Keep Your Sanity While Working From Home.
Disclaimer: This is not medical advice.
Eight months in various stage of lockdown is taking its toll. My days are getting shorter. Every day I’m repeating the same thing.
Wake up. Breakfast. Work. Lunch. Work. Dinner. Sleep.
Life is mundane. When we started working from home, it was fun. Finally! We can prove that productivity is consistent even when working from home. Yet, working from home during lockdown is not like working from home in the non-COVID world. And not everyone can handle the confinement. It is easy to get burnout.
This post isn’t about how to work better from home. But a guide to making your days meaningful. So that the days won’t go by unnoticed.
I still have the same 24 hours a day in 2020, the same as I did in 2019, and the years before that. But the daily routine and the lack of real-world interaction created an illusion of time compression. Sometimes, when the weekend came, I can’t even recall what happened that week.
I decided to take control of the situation by journalling. Now there are many ways to journal. I will list down what I did, you can use that as a starting point. It will evolve, and you’ll find a method that suits you.
When to journal?
- Before bed
- Continuously during the day
I started with the end of the day journal before I go to bed. It is a way to cap off the day and reflect. However, as I began to take more notes during the day, I started to incorporate my thoughts and reflections throughout the day too. I find that immediate self-feedback helped me clarify my thought process.
What to write?
- Events
- Gratitudes
- Learnings
- Plans
Events. These are notes on something that happened today, and my thoughts around it. Some times I wrote down my decision-making process. Other times I wrote exactly what happened. My goal is to highlight certain meaningful events of the day.
Gratitudes. It is the most important section for me. Even when I didn’t feel like writing anything, I’ll make sure I write few gratitudes for the day. I want to end the day with positivity. I think of it as the law of averaging positivity. Yes, there are bad days where I struggled to find something to be grateful for. But when I look back at my life a year from now, on average, things are great!
Learnings. How can you be better every day? As long as you are learning something new, no matter how insignificant, you are already better than yesterday. Writing these downs is a way I’m telling myself that I’m better than yesterday. It is easy to lose sight of our growth unless we look back and connect the dots.
Plans. I’m not too strict here. In fact, it is common for me to leave it blank. This section can be a todo list or an intention of things that I want to achieve tomorrow. It is a hit or miss for me. There are days where it helps guide my day, there are days where I went off track.
How to write it?
- Start with bullet points
You can go full-on captain’s log if you want — “26th October 2020, wind blowing southeast, slight thunderstorm. Today we encounter a new species…”.
If you love writing, by all means, write everything. Don’t worry about grammars and spelling. Write the memories directly, from your mind to the keyboard (or pen). No one else would read it, in fact, even you may not reread it.
I also tried text to speech tool, my favourite is Otter. I would babble about the day, and it will write it for me. I used to do this a lot before the lockdown, in the car on the way back home. But now, I prefer typing it down.
What works well for me is to write it down as bullet points — three points for gratitude, and three points for learning. And a bunch of disjointed points on events or thought for that day. Then I top it off with one or two things that I want to do tomorrow.
Bonus — A Dream journal
The prolonged lockdown seems to mix up dreams and reality. I have no scientific explanation for this, but it is common for me to dream of things that I need to do. I had a dream of missing a meeting, sent out email replies, and participating in a discussion. One time I dreamed about chatting in our Slack channel. What a nightmare!
So I write down my dreams to keep a reality check. I’m not strict here too, I could write a one-liner, or I could write a few pieces for a dream anthology.
Again, there are many ways to write a journal. There’s The Bullet Journal Method, 5 Seconds Journal, and many more. The goal to write things down is for you to take the time to appreciate your day and add meanings to it. Don’t let the day passed by unnoticed.
Key takeaways:
- Lockdowns can put you in a mundane routine.
- Journalling gives meaning to your day.
- Start with a single bullet point and evolve from there.
